


and all the ones that go

by ennaih (aquandrian)



Category: Bloodline (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, F/M, I hate them so much, how could you not right, i have a lot of feels for Danny, my poor Danny, this fkn family, what else would you expect from this damned show
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-28
Updated: 2016-06-28
Packaged: 2018-07-18 17:31:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7324288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aquandrian/pseuds/ennaih
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chelsea has no time for nostalgia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and all the ones that go

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dawn-quijote](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=dawn-quijote).



> This is for Dawn because she makes Mendo gifsets both of her own accord and to shameless pleas, and I wanted to write her fic as a thank you and she said maybe I could write something about Danny and Chelsea. This is what happened, and I'm so sorry because I'm a horrible person and the show makes me even more horrible so this is very sad and I hate myself. 
> 
> Title from _Mermaids_ by Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds cos I can't help that it fit so perfectly. This song breaks me. Every time.

Chelsea has no time to think about him. Between double shifts at the hospital and all the stupid drama with Eric, there is simply no time. But there are moments, brief breathless seconds when she’s waiting for the kettle to boil, or waiting for the elevator, or watching some child scream at a doctor, that she thinks of Danny and hurts. It seems like they were never anything but hurt.

But that’s not true, she knows that, she remembers. Sometimes, when watching that toxic fucking family rip up their world, it seems like she’s the only one who remembers how tender Danny could be. Sometimes it seems like maybe he only showed that to her and Eric. But that’s not true either. She knows that when she sees the grief on Sally’s painfully beautiful face. Sally never saw the cruelty of Danny, the rest of them never saw the sweetness. Or chose to forget it under the weight of every wrongheaded badhearted thing he did.

It’s like Eric and Chelsea are the only ones to carry the knowledge of Danny as he was through his whole life. And she knows, she knows that what she keeps and carries in her head of Danny are things he never shared with her brother. Most times she can ignore the soft weight of it. She moves through the life she’s built, the sane respectable useful life that breaks the family tradition of white trash still less toxic than the holy fucking Rayburns. She is her own person, separate enough from her brother that she can kick his ass without letting him drag her down with him. She survives. And sometimes, yes, she hates the knowledge of Danny that she holds and never lets go.

All the years of growing up together -- even as she held herself apart and evolved along her own path, now when she looks back, she sees how inextricably her life was twined with his. How they had been awkward and angry together, him and her, Eric more bumbling than them. They had recognised the jagged edges in each other, children as they were. And there had been laughs, hadn’t there? Silliness on the hidden beaches, in the water, on the decks. Jokes that were so hilarious, racing clattery bicycles that threatened to collapse under them at any moment, half-burnt fish roasted over small fires that got better as they learnt how.

They were friends before anything else. And then the anything else slowly crept in until she finds herself crying soundlessly at the kettle. 

All they could have had but never did. She had chosen ruthless respectability. He had veered off into so much anger and found so many people she wanted nothing to do with. Sometimes those people included her own idiot brother. And she doesn’t regret it, she doesn’t. She has her own anger after all, there are fucking reasons why she chose this life over anything they could have had together, and they were damned good reasons too, everything to do with her vile mother and the taint of toxic blood. 

Maybe he understood that in his own way. Maybe that’s why he stayed away, never tried to pull her into his other lives. And maybe that’s why he looked at her the way he did when he came back. With that great sad softness in his eyes, like he was looking at a life he could have had. It was lethal, how was she meant to resist it? Maybe she didn’t even try, reeled gently in by his wry small smile, by the tender incline of his head towards hers, the way his voice changed when he spoke to her. It was stupid and romantic, and Chelsea knows she’s neither of those things, never was, never would be. And yet if there was any history she would hold onto, maybe it was theirs, private so private.

They were each other’s first kiss. It wasn’t even the anything else, it was the strangely scientific curiosity of pre-pubescence. She can barely remember if she liked it but she remembers the weirdness of his lips against hers and she remembers how odd he found it too. They’d looked at each other in the half light of the mangroves -- he had lost the prettiness of youth and hadn’t yet found the beauty of maleness -- and laughed uncomfortably because really, was that all it was? So they never kissed again, fell back into the habits of wild slightly callous friends. He kissed other girls, she found other boys who actually made it feel nice and something interesting. They had grown into their sexuality without each other because their relationship wasn’t about that. It was much deeper, the fierce forged bond of found family, of traumatised kids who held each other up at one point and never forgot that.

The anything else really only began when he came back, looking so much more broken and faded than ever, like the world had drained him and he was barely holding himself together. She thought that when she watched him sleep, his cheek on his hand, the sight of him so breathlessly brutally vulnerable. It’s only when he’s with certain other people -- his fucking family -- that the knives come out, that he turns cruel and malevolent. She recognises it in her own face, her own voice. She’s like that with Eric, they’ve always been the same. And that’s why she sways towards him in the bar, feels his body respond to hers. They’ve been moving towards each other for so long, it seems, like it’s the only right thing in their monumentally fucked worlds. He bends his head to listen to her, her lips against his ear, his smile so disarmingly guileless, and then her lips against his mouth, tender and giving because this has only ever been right. This is the one moment that can be right.

One night is all they have. Of murmurs and memories, touching in the dim light of her room, watching him sleep in her bed, twisted up in her sheets, the bold curve of his cheekbone against the mess of his silver brown hair stranding on her pillow. There was heartbreak in the way he made love to her -- and it was love, she knew that, they both did -- and sometimes too much despair in the taste of his mouth, the way his skin dragged against hers. But for that one night, they’d kept the hideous world at bay.

In the morning, the world snapped right back around them. And now she keeps that secret time to herself.

When she sees Nolan for the first time, she’s shocked to the core. Not because of another woman and a child she never knew of, not because of another life he had without her. But because when she sees Nolan looking exactly like his father at that age, Chelsea realises.

He really is dead and never coming back.

They will never have another chance.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm so sorry. If I can figure out a way to write fluff for these two, I will, I promise.
> 
> Also, sorry about all the maddening tense changes. I'm not sure if that's me being overwrought or because the show itself is so time-jagged. You decide. :)
> 
> I have a LOT of feels about Danny. They always blindside me.


End file.
